Fraud Stains All It Touches

Oh, no, not again. What is it about parts of South Florida that make it such fertile territory for homegrown crooks to thrive?

The last thing residents need is another case of political corruption and fraud to stain their community's tarnished image.

The latest outbreak of fraud comes with the disclosure that 26 people are charged with ripping off Miami-Dade County government with millions of dollars in phony injury claims. Among them are 22 personal injury lawyers and four law firm employees.

These arrests bring to 61 the number of people accused of criminal wrongdoing in a massive, multimillion-dollar fraud scheme. It was uncovered in a joint investigation by the Miami-Dade Police Department and the state attorney's office, called "Operation Risky Business."

Others accused previously were medical clinic doctors and other workers and county risk-management employees, as well as people who pretended to be injured.

The scheme included fake slip-and-fall accidents on county sidewalks, phony car accidents and claims filed in the names of dead relatives of those supposedly injured.

The lawyers were accused of paying kickbacks averaging 10 percent to county risk management employees to process, expedite and inflate the value of phony claims. Over nine years, they collected more than 1,000 settlements for bogus accidents and injuries, often to people who did not even exist.

The scope of the fraud is huge. Miami-Dade government was defrauded of more than $1 million a year, about a third of what it pays out in settlements.

The involvement of lawyers and doctors in this fraud is particularly disturbing. If convicted, all the lawyers should not only face fines and jail terms like other defendants, but also loss of their right to practice law in Florida. Any convicted doctors should lose their medical licenses.

All 26 nabbed in the latest round of arrests were charged with unlawful compensation. Eight were also charged with racketeering.

The arrests not only reflect badly on those directly involved, but on county Mayor Alex Penelas and county commissioners, who are supposed to provide proper leadership and oversight to prevent such crimes from occuring. Yet, over the past few years, Miami-Dade County government has been wracked with a series of nasty public corruption scandals.

South Floridians are understandably shocked, angered and embarrassed to learn once again that greed-driven fraud and political corruption thrives in their part of the state.

But they should also take pride that local law officers and prosecutors are working aggressively and successfully to root out the wrongdoing and bring its perpetrators to justice.